Although known popularly by the moniker “Xtina”, Aguilera refused from the outset to change her “too ethnic” sounding official name for brand mass appeal. Perhaps more than any other modern pop star, Christina María Aguilera breaks the mold and pushes dramatically against Lieb’s suppositions. But which ones survive Lieb’s model? Is there a woman both beyond and within the twelve types? Is there creative life beyond the standard pop lifecycle? And yet, Lieb leaves the door open: some female artists can be among the “exceptional few” whose careers can transcend the pop machine.

The reducibility of artists to a marketable brand, a handled and objectified commodity with a sell-by end-date, is implicitly accepted as a core reality of the music industry in Lieb’s work. Beyond the “lifecycle” terminology, Lieb consistently refers to the “handlers” of female pop stars who learn lessons from other success stories in order to better handle their products (30). Transgress and the lifecycle collapses with the artist reaching creative obsolescence. Each female artist must fit neatly into one box at any given time. Generally, Lieb’s lifecycle model contains twelve female “types”: the good girl, the temptress, the diva, the exotic, the hot mess, the provocateur, etc. While her criticism of the music business is admirable and much of her evidence solid, Lieb’s failure is one of rhetoric, one that she at least is aware of: “I have used the language of music industry professionals, even when this language is problematic from an academic standpoint” (88). In unfortunate terms, Lieb calls this model the “lifecycle for female popular music stars”. In Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry (Routledge, 2013) Lieb develops a rubric to assess the vitality of particular pop female brands. Has Aguilera’s pop musical lifecycle ended? or is her truth and importance much more complicated? Lieb argues, “Simply put, for all but the exceptional few, the career lifecycle for female artists is much shorter than it is for male artists” (89). In her book and subsequent public lectures, Marketing Communications professor Kristin J. In recent years, much has been made of Aguilera’s tenuous relationship with pop superstardom, with many pondering her relevance in the post-melisma, auto-tuned digital age. This opening track raises questions the rest of the album seeks to answer: Who or what is Aguilera trying to remember? Who is she calling out for? Who are these children? With Liberation, what freedom from limit or thought or behavior is Aguilera achieving? Woven into the background of “Liberation”, written and produced by Moonlight composer Nicholas Britell, are children laughing. These questions and an imperative, two calls and a response, appear as the only words on the first instrumental title track of Christina Aguilera’s eighth studio album Liberation (RCA, 2018).

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